- Semiconductor microchips are the beating heart of the digital age — processing vast, ever-growing volumes of data on our smart phones, computers and other electronic devices, and on data center servers worldwide.
- As manufacturers compete to produce the ever-smaller, more powerful electronic devices consumers want, new state-of-the-art silicon chips must be designed to handle exponentially advancing computing challenges.
- But the sourcing and manufacture of these increasingly complex silicon chips is material-, energy- and water-intensive, doing major environmental harm — producing major carbon emissions and polluting with PFAS and other toxins.
- Also, the smaller and more integrated chips become, the harder they are to recycle, creating vast sums of e-waste. Experts say governments need to ensure companies embrace environmental stewardship and circular economy standards.
In recent decades, the electronics industry experienced meteoric growth as it swiftly invented and marketed a galaxy of novel products for consumers hungry for the next innovation, better performance and greater convenience. In 2024, the consumer electronics market alone is expected to top $809 billion, exceeding $1.4 trillion by 2034.
But there’s a dark side to this tech miracle: Our digital age love affair with ever-more-powerful cell phones, smart TVs, laptops, tablets, gaming consoles and other devices comes with a high price.
The environmental and social costs of producing the trillions of silicon semiconductor chips needed to run our gadgets and to operate remote data centers is escalating incredibly fast and “fostering an environmental time bomb,” warns Ian Williams, professor of applied environmental science at the University of Southampton, U.K.
“The environmental impact of making semiconductor chips is already huge and increasing rapidly,” Williams tells Mongabay. Today, the complex integrated circuitry inside an electronic device is a miracle of miniaturization and nanometer-accurate precision with each millimeter-thick, fingernail-sized silicon chip incorporating 30-100 sandwiched layers of etched interconnected transistors and electronic components.
But chip structure and computing power doesn’t stand still: It must keep pace with new tech innovations. “Each new generation requires more energy and water and generates more greenhouse gases than the previous generation,” Williams explains.
However, few seem aware of the looming risk. Competition among tech giants to produce faster, more advanced devices is leading to unbridled demand for increasingly sophisticated semiconductors, worsening global impacts.
Unless urgent action is taken — getting industry to embrace responsible environmental and circular economy standards — Williams warns that runaway expansion could push the world even further beyond the already transgressed safe planetary boundary limits for climate change, biosphere integrity, land system change and freshwater use.
Impacts of today’s silicon chip industry
When it comes to carbon emissions, semiconductors are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they can increase electronic device energy efficiency, thus helping reduce greenhouse gas emissions — a benefit and selling point frequently stressed by industry proponents. But, on the other hand, this advantage is more than offset by the environmental damage increasingly caused by chip manufacturing.
The primary component of each semiconductor chip is silicon, a nonmetallic element occurring extensively in Earth’s crust. Some 9 million tons of silicon are currently mined globally every year. China produces the most — approximately 6 million tons annually — with other major sources including Russia, Brazil and the United States.
Chips also contain copper, aluminium, silver, gold, boron and phosphorus, all of which must be mined or quarried, as well as petrochemically sourced plastics and even arsenic (a known carcinogen). The supply chains for all these ingredients carry with them their own sets of environmental harms and societal impacts.
Manufacturing 1 ton of silicon generates 5 tons of CO2 because the process of transforming raw ore into pure silicon requires tremendous heat — up to 3,000° Celsius (5,432° Fahrenheit). It’s like “working in a volcano,” one worker reports.
Achieving such intense heat requires petroleum coke, coal and high-grade hardwood charcoal, such as that sourced from tropical forests in Myanmar.
An investigation in Myanmar for Mongabay in 2017 found that forests covering the equivalent of 14,000 football pitches were being cut down annually so that illegally sourced charcoal could be transported to China to feed its silicon smelting plants.
Williams says there is “nothing remotely as energy- and material-intensive as a silicon chip.” The manufacture of a typical 1-gram chip can require up to 800 grams (1.7 pounds) of fossil fuels, 30 grams (0.1 pounds) of chemicals, 16,000 grams (35 pounds) of water and 350 grams (0.8 pounds) of elemental gases, the American Chemical Society found in 2002. A paper by Marcello Ruberti published this year substantiates these earlier findings and notes that the increase in chip technological capacity is being accompanied by a commensurate increase in resource use and waste creation.
This isn’t expected to change in the short term due to the current global shortage of chips. In 2021, Risto Puhakka, president of VLSI Research, a leading analyst of the chip industry, said: “The issue for the last year [2020] is that the customers have been more concerned about getting the actual product than its environmental impact.”
The climate news isn’t good either: The silicon industry (whose biggest chip manufacturers include Nvidia, Samsung, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company [TSMC], Broadcom, Intel and others) is already a significant emitter of greenhouse gases, with one source saying the sector annually produces the equivalent of half the CO2 emissions of all U.S. households.
A booming future for chips and their impacts
Today’s environmental impacts could be a mere shadow of what lies ahead, with harms caused by silicon chip manufacturing potentially increasing exponentially. Demand for semiconductors is rocketing, with market size projected to increase from $611 billion in 2023 to $2 trillion by 2032.
Add to this explosive growth a problem with AI, which is driving a surge in the need for super-high-energy chips at the world’s data centers. A state-of the-art computer server from NVIDIA, the leading company in AI chip design, can possess an “idle power demand of 700+ watts, depending on the number of GPUs [graphics processing units] it has, which is more than the aggregate demand of 2-3 [of today’s] standard servers,” according to Rich Kenny, the managing director of Interact, a global environmental consultancy.
“So, when a NVIDIA server isn’t even doing any work, it’s still consuming more energy than 2-3 standard servers being used to their maximum,” he adds. An AI chip can use as much electricity as three electric car batteries, with AI as a whole predicted to soon be consuming as much electricity as entire countries, such as the Netherlands or Sweden.
When contacted by Mongabay, an NVIDIA spokesperson contests the assertion that its servers will lead to an unsustainable increase in electricity demand, saying: “Accelerated computing, the method NVIDIA pioneered, is sustainable computing. The U.S. Department of Energy reported an average 5x improvement in energy efficiency running AI workloads on a GPU-accelerated supercomputer. Using GPUs instead of CPUs, researchers could save millions of dollars and avoid the consumption of 588 megawatt hours of electricity per month.”
The NVIDA spokesperson adds, “By accelerating every workload, society has an opportunity to reduce emissions, meet short-term demand challenges, and leverage AI to solve climate change.”
Mongabay contacted other leading tech companies that make chips, including Samsung, Apple and Google, to get their views on the environmental challenges their ever-faster electronic devices face, but they declined to comment.
Water consumption is another chip-related concern. A lot of water is already needed to cool semiconductors during operation at the world’s huge data centers. A Financial Times report found that in “data center alley,” in the U.S. state of Virginia, water “usage has increased by almost two-thirds since 2019.”
But the next generation of chips will likely require even more water for cooling and cleaning. Chips are now being manufactured on the scale of nanometers. A dust particle is often 1,000 times bigger than a semiconductor and can fall like a boulder, damaging the super-sensitive chip. To keep everything hyper-clean, huge quantities of ultrapure water are required during manufacture.
End-of-life issues also loom large: Every year, chips get smaller and more complex. But that’s a problem because when it comes to semiconductor design, there’s an inherent conflict between that which is light, small, fast and cheap and that which is repairable, reusable and recyclable. The elements of tiny integrated circuits are soldered, so their many materials are deeply and rigidly intertwined and alloyed, which means they can’t be separated in a useful way.
Put simply, today’s semiconductors can’t be recycled. And, without a radical new design, those in the future aren’t expected to do better. Like single use plastics, they’re probably headed at the end of life to the world’s landfills.
E-waste is now humanity’s fastest-growing waste stream (even ahead of plastics), and perhaps the most toxic. E-waste contains multiple known and suspected neurotoxicants, including lead and mercury, which can disrupt the development of the central nervous system of unborn babies, children and adolescents. Much e-waste is dumped by the Global North in the Global South, where the poorest women and children rake through toxic dump piles, searching for material they can sell.
The early history of semiconductor manufacturing
Northern California’s Santa Clara Valley was once known as the “Valley of Heart’s Delight.” Families would come from afar on springtime pilgrimages to participate in the famed “blossom tours.” Today, the region has a less romantic name: Silicon Valley.
In the mid-20th century, the third industrial revolution (centered on information technology and silicon) arrived there, following on the heels of the second revolution (based on electricity, gas and oil) and the first (based on coal).
Silicon Valley — fueled by a skilled, educated workforce and an even larger female migrant manual workforce, as well as by plentiful venture capital and permissive government regulations — quickly became home to many of the world’s largest high-tech corporations and thousands of startups. It was here that the silicon-based integrated circuit, the microprocessor and microcomputer, among other technologies, were perfected.
By the 1970s, the downside of the industry was becoming clear. The region’s soil and water were being polluted with myriad chemicals. High-tech waste, dumped freely down public drains or leaking from underground chemical tanks, laced the environment with heavy metals such as cadmium, nickel and lead.
It was a side of the industry that companies underplayed or sought to hide. “A lot of design was about deliberately placing industrial infrastructure out of sight,” scientist Josh Lepawsky tells Mongabay. “Literally putting it underground. Why did they do this? The marketing and the industrial interests — out of which digital technologies emerge — want to trade on the image of being light, green. Think of all the metaphors we use for digital technologies, like ‘The Cloud’, for example.”
As the years passed, it got harder to hide the greatest concentration of toxic dump sites in the United States — Santa Clara County has 23 federally designated Superfund sites.
Ultimately, tech companies chose to maintain the higher, cleaner functions of their industry (design and engineering) in Silicon Valley, while outsourcing much of the environmental harm to nations with more lenient regulations. Silicon Valley manufacturers refashioned themselves as being “fabless,” meaning they outsourced the “fabrication” of their product to other manufacturers, many located in Asia.
The Taiwan example
Taiwan seized on this chip making opportunity, partly as the result of the efforts of one man, Shih Chin-tay. He grew up in a Taiwan fishing village and then, at age 23, traveled to Princeton University in 1969. “When I landed, I was shocked,” Shih says. “I thought to myself: Taiwan is so poor; I must do something.”
In 1987, with the help of the Taiwanese government, he and other engineers set up what became the world’s biggest chip manufacturer, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. By 2022, TSMC and other Taiwan-based companies employed a local workforce of about 600,000 with revenue of $170 billion, contributing 15% to Taiwan’s GDP. It’s where most of the world’s high-tech chips are now made.
But this had a considerable environmental impact on the Asian nation. Gauthier Roussilhe and colleagues at Australia’s Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology found that from 2015-20, carbon emissions from Taiwan chip manufacturing increased by 7.5% on average each year. The sector is currently responsible for around 12% of Taiwan’s annual greenhouse gas emissions, and that could increase threefold by 2050. TSMC says it will be net zero by 2050, but its precise pathway to this goal isn’t clear.
As Taiwanese chip manufacturers strive to emit less, they’re using more energy. TSMC’s electricity consumption grew by more than 30% between 2020 and 2022, consuming as much electricity as a quarter of Taiwan’s population. Less than 10% of the industry’s energy currently comes from wind, solar or hydro, and its electricity grid is highly dependent on coal.
The industry’s most serious environmental concern at present is water. In 2021, Taiwan saw its worst drought in a century, followed in 2023 by another serious drought in which the Tsengwen dam, one of the country’s largest reservoirs, fell to just 10% of capacity. For the third year in a row, rice farmers in southern Taiwan were not allowed to plant crops because TSMC needed the water.
“We barely have enough water, and you’re diverting even more for others to use,” Yang Kuanwei, a tomato farmer in the country’s Tainan county, complained to the government.
Future water prospects aren’t good. Although Taiwan was once known for lush forests and abundant rainfall, desertification is spreading. As one commentator says: “Investors are slowly recognizing that the world’s insatiable appetite for semiconductors has run smack into the consequences of climate change.”
TSMC did not respond to Mongabay’s request for comments.
China fears
It was not environmental concerns but geopolitics that caused the United States to rethink its semiconductor strategy. By the 2020s, as China’s sabre rattling against Taiwan escalated, the U.S. government grew fearful of reliance on Taiwan and offered $53 billion in grants and subsidies to encourage companies to build semiconductor plants in the United States. Major players took advantage, including, ironically, TSMC itself, which is investing in two U.S. plants worth $40 billion, their only facilities outside Taiwan.
This policy change created an opportunity for another country: Costa Rica. With a market-friendly government and close enough to the U.S. to allay national security fears, the Caribbean nation seized its chance. High-tech investment is flooding in.
On a visit to an area dominated by banana plantations earlier this year, Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves Robles flaunted his government’s tech image: “Who wants to carry bunches of bananas rather than go to work in a microprocessor factory producing the world’s most in-demand technology?” The president had earlier presented the country’s plan for semiconductor industry growth in the capital, San José, in the presence of U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo and Gen. Laura Richardson, the military commander of the U.S. Southern Command.
Discussion over the environmental impact of the semiconductor industry is, as yet, muted in Costa Rica. But the country is currently suffering from its worst drought in five decades, a climate change-driven trend, which, if it continues, could bring collisions between water and energy hungry data centers, chip makers and agriculture.
The genie out of the bottle
Action must be taken now to avoid worsening semiconductor industry impacts, says Williams, who believes chip manufacturers must embrace environmental stewardship and the circular economy. “Companies should optimize water consumption and invest in water recycling systems,” he recommends.
He points to other measures: Semiconductor “fabs often rely on fossil fuels [during manufacture], so shifting to solar or wind energy can reduce carbon emissions. Manufacturers should properly manage waste, including chemical sludge, contaminated water and silicon dust.”
Kenny stresses the need for chip makers to “mitigate the harm [they do] by ensuring a transparent supply chain for critical raw materials.” The supply chains of the hundreds of chemicals, plastics and metals going into chips need to be evaluated for their environmental and social costs, as do chip production and end-of-life disposal.
Lepawsky warns there may be “no short-term solutions.” He says chip makers need to phase out harmful chemicals, including PFAS, but a green transition could take years.
More fundamental change is also needed, with governments that have long offered sweetheart tax and subsidy deals to the chip industry, better regulating it. Lepawsky says companies should be forbidden from designing chips that can’t be comprehensively recycled, while also banning chips in vapes and other disposable products to reduce e-waste. Education is also key: As yet, bodies like the World Economic Forum have only stressed the benefits that electronic devices bring. Most users remain unaware of the harms their devices do.
Perhaps more importantly, governments, NGOs and consumers need to begin questioning whether it’s worth dangerously transgressing planetary boundary limits, and threatening the “safe operating space for humanity” so the world can enjoy the very coolest, newest, smallest, fastest electronic devices.
Banner image: Workers in “Agbogbloshie,” a site with electronic scrap material, in Ghana, 2011. Image by Marlenenapoli via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).
Playing dangerously: The environmental impact of video gaming consoles
Citations:
Ruberti, M. (2023). The chip manufacturing industry: Environmental impacts and eco-efficiency analysis. Science of The Total Environment, 858, 159873. doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.159873
Richardson, K., Steffen, W., Lucht, W., Bendtsen, J., Cornell, S. E., Donges, J. F., … Rockström, J. (2023). Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries. Science Advances, 9(37). doi:10.1126/sciadv.adh2458
Williams, E. D., Ayres, R. U., & Heller, M. (2002). The 1.7 kilogram Microchip: energy and material use in the production of semiconductor devices. Environmental Science & Technology, 36(24), 5504-5510. doi:10.1021/es025643o
Ruberti, M. (2024). Environmental performance and trends of the world’s semiconductor foundry industry. Journal of Industrial Ecology. doi:10.1111/jiec.13529
Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, A., Chapin III, F. S., Lambin, E. F., … Foley, J. A. (2009). A safe operating space for humanity. Nature. Retrieved from https://www.nature.com/articles/461472a
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